My takeaways:
Mosseri says that the Threads team wants to make it so the option to follow a Threads account on other platforms is available to “all public accounts on Threads, not just a handful of testers.”
You can only follow other threads accounts?
At the moment, he says the team plans to require accounts to be public and that users “explicitly opt in” to showing their posts on other federated servers. But the team is still considering making this the default, with the choice to opt out, instead.
They’re planning on using the fediverse content and server space without providing any.
The Threads team wants to let replies from other platforms show up inside of Threads. “It’s a bad experience now that I have to leave the Threads app to see replies I’m getting from the broader community,”
It’s the content they want the most, this makes it clear if you have to leave their app to reply to someone on another instance. We’re the zoo.
This is a key one: follower portability. “Eventually, it should also be possible to enable creators to leave Threads and take their followers with them to another app / server,” Mosseri writes. “I believe that it’s important that creators own their relationship with their audience.”
The bolded words makes me think that they’re not going to do any of that, lol
Please instance owners, don’t wait and see.
This is a key one: follower portability. “Eventually, it should also be possible to enable creators to leave Threads and take their followers with them to another app / server,” Mosseri writes. “I believe that it’s important that creators own their relationship with their audience.”
How do they benefit from it though? 🤔
They benefit by being able to say to regulators, especially in the EU, that they aren’t a monopoly that locks people into their ecosystem. They avoid expensive legal battles, fines, and possibly being forced to open their other, more lucrative silos. These are lesser benefits, but they also get cred for doing something cool, get to position themselves as a better alternative to Twitter, and might get to say that they beat Bluesky to full federation.
That’s reasonable although I believe it’s just not how they do things. This feature lets their users to move to ad-free mastodon instances including those that signed fedi-pact. And it will be available in a few clicks in their app (I suppose it will).
they beat Bluesky to full federation.
I also think they’re more interested in Bluesky.
Their last EU fine was $1.3 billion. That’s change-how-you-do-things money. The EU is getting more serious about tech regulation. It also made Apple add RCS support, which they swore they’d never do.
This feature lets their users to move to ad-free mastodon instances including those that signed fedi-pact.
I don’t think that’s possible. You have to be federated. Suspended servers can’t connect at all so there’s no way to transfer followers or set a redirect. It’s not something you can just choose to not respect - suspension is something done to untrustworthy servers so requiring them to honor it would completely break it immediately. If they signed the fedi pact and didn’t act, that’s not really on Meta.
I don’t think that’s possible. You have to be federated.
Still possible with intermediary but yeah, that’s much less convenient. Well, I hope that’s true. Unfortunately, even if they really have done this because of EU they still may try to monetize non-Threads users.
If they use a Mastodon intermediary, there’s a 30-day cool down. If they use their own, they’d have to expose the IP to do it so it would be discovered. I don’t see how it would benefit them to do that. If they did, that’s some sketchy, bad faith shit and they’d be universally fediblocked pretty quick.
I also don’t think they can monetize non-threads users because they can’t send them ads. It would be difficult to connect you to a Meta account to serve ads to because they only have your user name, profile pic, server IP, and server domain name. In most cases it’d be impossible. You’re pretty well protected because Mastodon servers treat all remote servers as untrustworthy and don’t give them any info.
It would be difficult to connect you to a Meta account to serve ads to because they only have your user name, profile pic, server IP, and server domain name. In most cases it’d be impossible. You’re pretty well protected because Mastodon servers treat all remote servers as untrustworthy and don’t give them any info.
Facebook already creates “shadow profiles” for people not on Facebook and stores data about them. This means Meta won’t directly monetize the fediverse, but use the data available for their ad business anyway. (Maybe even connect other accounts through posts, but I don’t know how well this works with the info and amount of a users posts.)
Nothing stopping them from doing it now, anyone posting to the fediverse has to accept that their posts can and probably will be used to train someone elses LLM. It’s public afterall.
[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/768652/what-are-facebook-shadow-profiles-and-should-you-be-worried/
idk, the primary motivator is probably PR, but there is a chance that there’s still a trace, a glimmer of empathy and excitement for innovation, hidden way down somewhere in that human.
Don’t count on it, though.
the primary motivator is probably PR
They could go a bluesky route and build their own protocol so they could have more control over it. I don’t think non-techy people would care about federation to be honest.
Fair point, but they also have to please the EU, which won’t buy them creating a new protocol with two existing ones gaining major traction, of which one is w3c standard.
e: typo
Great, so he is already talking about how to extend activityPub? He says that like this function will be a one way street. This is literally what many here are talking about.
He’s literally talking about the ability to migrate accounts, or the very least export your data. Which is a feature on many platforms of Fediverse. There’s no “extend” whatsoever
If I understand correctly he’s talking about the ability to export your account data and then import it to another compatible fedi server. Other software (mastodon, latest version of lemmy, etc) also do it on a client side, so I don’t think any changes to AP will be necessary.
What is concerning is his wording about “to leave threads”. Consider that whatever saying in this interview is carefully laid out beforehand. What reason is there for a corporation that is living of it’s users to just so casually let them leave like they please with everything that is giving value to Meta? He is not talking about wanting the users to leave threads, but to be able to migrate either direction. Who is going to win that fight in the end? The corporation who’s solely goal is to win or the free and open community that is so tolerant that it invites the beast it fled from?
Yep, that’s really concerning. Is it possible for export account function to inject some kind of ID to continue spying on a user even after they’ve leaved Threads (even on a non-federated instance)?
May be the whole plan is to kill ActivityPub or they want all the data to train AI or target ads.
Take your time, Mark III Zucker-borg. I’m in no rush for you to screw up yet another web site with your ads and your propaganda.
Take your time. Take forever.
In the view of Suckerberg and Mosseri : In the future there will be no Fediverse exist, only Threadverse
Well they can plan it if they want to, but I’m sure many instances will just end up blocking them and there isn’t anything they can do about it. But on the other hand, having such a large backing is making things much easier for Threads.
Is threads still even active? The few users I knew on it don’t use it anymore.
That might be why they want to start integrating. Get a free user base and poach content to make it look like positive activity.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
On Friday, two days after Threads finally started publicly testing ActivityPub integration, Instagram head Adam Mosseri shared a thread on Threads detailing the company’s plans for its continued integration with the fediverse.
Right now, it’s possible to follow a few Threads accounts (including Mosseri’s) from other platforms, but Meta has much bigger plans for Threads interoperability that Mosseri says will take “the better part of a year” to realize.
Mosseri says the updates will roll out “in stages,” and he recognizes that the “better part of a year” timeline is a long one.
“That’s a lot longer than I, or anybody on the team, wants, but it’s the reality given all the other work we need to be balance,” he says.
I’ve watched a Threads video from Mosseri on Mastodon, that rules!
Update December 15th, 5:57PM ET: Added screenshots of Mosseri’s thread.
The original article contains 171 words, the summary contains 142 words. Saved 17%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Interesting. I’m on Mastedon, but not active. I’m curious if I’ll notice any changes by next year.
You should pop over there now if “Everyone screaming at each other about Threads” is one of your interests.
Yeah it’s out of control. My main instance is in fedipact, which I support, so I’m kinda set.
But it’s like 50% of my feed and it’s too much.
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As if I give a fuck about looking weird to the Jack Dorsey Appreciation Society.
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